…
If the goal was to entice undeserving applicants, you couldn’t design a worse combination of policy and resources. In comparison, the bipartisan proposal is designed to deny more cases at the initial stage and get final decisions on all cases in a matter of months.
For immigration hardliners, the moment of leverage had finally arrived: More enforcement without amnesty. However, instead of seizing this likely once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, House Republicans and former President Trump argued that the bill was not the hardliner wish list they preferred and successfully convinced most Senate Republicans to block the bill.
This one-sided deal that favors Republican enforcement policy is unlikely to ever reappear. There has never been another moment this century when Democrats agreed to enforcement legislation without meaningful legalization provisions. Nor have they ever agreed to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to anywhere near the level needed to locate and deport millions of individuals already in the country illegally.
Disclaimers; I’m not American, and would be considered pretty left-leaning by their standards… but:
A nation should get to decide who can enter and stay (either by visa, or by agreement - eg. Schengen); this entire ‘illegal immigration’ issue has been intentionally perpetrated by both sides for political gain, at the cost of the lives and well-beings of those affected.
Razor-wire fences, and sanctuary cities are both terrible policies, that show the total callousness of the American political system.
Ultimately, with strict border policy enforcement - those that currently profit the most from undocumented labour will be the ones to suffer, and would likely push for increased/streamlined legal migration of desired labour, with the added benefit of increased wages for local residents.
Australia experienced something similar in our agricultural sector during the COVID lockdowns, where the limited labour-force became a highly sought after commodity, given that the dodgier farms were no longer able to exploit backpackers for slave wages. Companies that had previously been paying award wages (basically minimum wage - equivalent to ~$15 USD/hr) or lower, not had to offer up to 50% more during peak harvest seasons in order to not have their fields go to rot.
At the end of the day, hard-working labour made significantly more money - at a relatively low cost to the end-user.
The two are not at all equivalent.
Erecting barriers like razor wire are meant to dehumanizing the people who try to get across. We are literally treating them like cattle. Especially when we decide to get rid of the problem by shipping them somewhere else.
There are a bunch of different type of Santctuary City policies, but they all boil down to local law enforcement and municipal employees deliberately not asking about the immigration status of people when applying for services or seeking police protection. Which kind of makes sense, if your goal is to uphold human dignity. If someone who is living here gets their stuff stolen, should they feel afraid to go to the cops because they might be deported? What about those folks who came here as infants and had no clue they weren’t citizens? Do they need to present their papers before interacting with the local government?
We have different layers of government in this country for a reason. It is perfectly acceptable for a locality to say “It’s not our job to police immigration status, the Federal Government has enough resources to do that and we won’t do their job for them”.
One policy affirms basic humanity, while the other removes it from a class of people based on where they were born.
Both sides? What exactly have the Democrats done or supported that is equal to what the Republicans are doing (e.g. putting up the razorwire you mentioned, letting asylum seekers drown, bussing and dumping misled and unprepared asylum seekers on the streets in northern cities in the middle of winter without even letting those cities know about the crisis they are creating)? As far as I know, the Democratic party has supported asylum and pathways to citizenship.
They did continue putting children in cages